A Thesis on Loco-Manipulation with Non-impulsive Contact-Implicit Planning in a Slithering Robot

Object manipulation has been extensively studied in the context of fixed base and mobile manipulators. However, the overactuated locomotion modality employed by snake robots allows for a unique blend of object manipulation through locomotion, referred to as loco-manipulation. The following work presents an optimization approach to solving the loco-manipulation problem based on non-impulsive implicit contact path planning for our snake robot COBRA. This thesis presents the mathematical framework and show high-fidelity simulation results and experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.